It’s Saturday morning and I am winding up some work that should be done in a few minutes. My face feels weird and after running my hands over it, I realize that I am smiling. This smile is based on the fact that for the first weekend in about 6 weeks, I don’t have to work throughout the entire weekend.

Some work to do? Yes.

Slaving over my keyboard all day and night until Monday? No.

Smile.

And I have plans. When I finish this last little bit, I will work out, and then I will go downtown to buy hotdog buns. Sound crazy? You wouldn’t think so if you’d had these buns? Like golden doughy envelopes of heaven that make you forget you have worked through the last 6 weekends.

The workout begins. It’s the only thing in the way of a joy that can only come from having freedom of not being needed while having hotdogs. As I begin my first squat, an ominous crunching sound comes from somewhere in the room. There are a few kinds of crunching sounds. There’s happy food crunching, which comes from biting into cereal or nutty candby; there’s sad food crunching which suggests the diner is eating carrots or celery. Then there’s an unnatural crunching, which suggests that the thing being crunched into had planned to stay intact for the remainder of its existence. This crunch implies a post-crunch cleanup session.

This is one of those crunches.     

A plastic lens from Burke’s eyeglasses has popped out and the dog is doing her best to crack it into several small pieces – aka shards.

My workout shifts from squats and burpees to diving to the ground and wrestling with a Shih tzu while jamming my fingers in her mouth to extract shards of plastic. I get what I can and spread the pieces out on the counter so I can recreate the jigsaw puzzle. It’s mostly accounted for – big pieces and a few shards – but there is certainly a tiny gap or two. The dog is licking her chops like she does after dinner.

A quick search online confirms the danger of having sharp things go through a small dog’s intestines. Two calls to emergency vets get the same reaction: You should bring her in. But an emergency vet on a Saturday, the subtext is: don’t forget your wallet.

Ten minutes later, we’re outside. The dog is running and sniffing and enjoying life. She unloads two poops and though I am fairly certain it couldn’t have been digested and processed yet, I check the poop. You never know; the dog’s like a foot long. Nevertheless, there’s nothing. Nothing but a middle-aged man inspecting poop and explaining it to the dog.    

This is naturally when Artem pulls up as my Uber Pet driver. He locks his own door as I get in the back. I get it, for sure. How safe can you be with a pissed-off looking weirdo who talks to poop and is now carrying a little dog into your car. But still, I’m in the car. What good did locking your driver’s side do?

The ride is ten minutes. I spend the time reviewing phrases and vocabulary that I sometimes know, sometimes forget. Poop (verb), throw up, swallow, sharp. The receptionist is alone in the waiting room. I say hello.

It’s a Tuesday morning in March. When said and done, the bleakest time on the most uninspiring day in the trickiest month. If people throughout history could choose their day and time of execution, I have no doubt there’d be a waiting list for Tuesday mornings in March.

This Tuesday in March also happens to fall on the 17^th, which is sort of like ‘hump day’ of the month, but in March it opens up a whole other bag of whiskey-soaked worms. Tis St. Patrick’s Day.

When I was a kid, I openly and gleefully believed in the full run of the year’s supernatural holiday characters. I was there with Santa. I did not fear the Easter Bunny, even when he took Santa’s angle and a deranged too-tall rabbit set up shop at a crooked cabin made of candy near the Payless Shoe Store. I was in. So on Saint Patrick’s Day the search was clearly for leprechauns and pixies.

I set up traps. We were told to ‘look anywhere green’ which made complete sense as Ireland was supposed to be green and that’s what everyone wore. Anyway, these traps were crude and involved a shoebox and a stick and a rope, suited more to catching cartoon bunnies and not so much mystical beings known for its slyness and cleverness. It will surprise you in no way to learn that these traps were mostly left unsprung. (I once caught a cricket, but had to let him go under a self-imposed Geneva Convention of fairness and ickiness.)

These days, I read about Celtic folklore a bit more than I did then and it seems that I may have dodged a bullet not catching one of those guys. I might have been brought somewhere I didn’t want to go or turned into a stone whose purpose was to be kissed by tourists.

When I reached adult-ish-hood, St. Patty’s Day was about drinking one’s face off until you actually saw fairies and pixies and leprechauns and started a fist fight with them in the bathroom of a Wawa. Since then, pubs are perennially pounded on this day. In Pittsburgh, this meant the city’s six Irish pubs were overtaken by the masses. I recall a line of ¾ poured Guinness waiting topping off, people shouting orders for their position 4-deep, a band with a banjo player wearing green bowlers, hearing Whiskey in the Jar roughly 200 times in 7 hours, waking up half-on-half-off my bed, my face covered in shamrock stickers, which, when all considered, could have been worse.

The real Saint Patrick was born in Roman Britain in the late 4th century. He was kidnapped by Irish raiders and enslaved, spending several years working as a shepherd in Ireland. During this time he became deeply religious, probably because of all the sheep. After escaping, he helped spread Christianity across Ireland along with a bunch of other similar characters. He droves the snakes out of Ireland, a feat particularly impressive as there are no snakes in Ireland. So this means he brought them there in the first place, which ups his charlatan game heaps. He also used a shamrock to explain Christianity. I think that little green flower does some heavy lifting on this day by way of facial stickers and partial names in drinks (the shamrock shake, comes to mind).

In the end, it’s believed that the snakes are a metaphor for the pagan and pagan religions that he drove out of Ireland. Or, as I like to think it, the far more interesting culture of spirituality. So, a former slave brought a bunch of snakes to Ireland and then scared them away, or he caught and got rid of all the pagans. Anyway, I wonder if he used a trap.    

I don’t want to regale you with the level of shittiness occurring at the global level these days. A brief recap goes like this: addled, mind-numbingly stupid man runs a government on spite and purposeful ineptitude & might start WWIII because his predecessor was much better at his job than him and people liked him; petty coward who lives in Budapest can’t handle free elections, so he’s doing everything he can to cheat right in front of our eyes rather than just be – the horror of it – a better leader; small, small man who probably lives in a bunker somewhere north of Moscow started a war and has been trying to gaslight the world with the whole ‘well if you just gave me this, I’d leave. This is really your fault.’

Sadly this is but the creamy top of the crap sandwich of the way people are making the world a bad place to live right now. There are also greedy billionaires, bullies, and conmen galore. The American government is no longer Republican or Democrat, but a subset of the UFC and World Wrestling Federation. We get tough guy speeches from plumbers who hid behind chairs. Empathy is scoffed at, unless it’s for a right-wing podcaster, then it’s required by law.   

Deep breath in. Deep breath out.  

Like most people – and I mean that, most people – I have simple wants. I want to be healthy, I want to save a little money, I want to stop working at some point, I want to have fun, and I want to live long enough to see World War Z made into a limited 8-episode series like it says in the Bible. I want the same (more or less) for my friends, family, and community. I don’t want to hate people and I don’t want other people to not have things just because they disagree with me. I think this is true of most people. And I think it’s no secret to us lowlings that we have all been convinced to loathe our neighbor for about 10 years now. What a terrible state of global affairs.

It’s a Monday night and I’m having a time. Burke has begun taking art classes, which affords me a rare thing – a night on my own. Like most wild rambunctious chaps, I spend it watching reruns of Columbo, doing my Czech homework, and reading.

Tonight’s an educational night to be sure. Už tři týdny se zabývám hrozným instrumentálem. Jsem v pekle. For those who don’t read Czech or who don’t want to spend four seconds translating that, just suffice it to say that if I go to the bad place when I die, the coursebook Czech Step by Step will be there waiting for me covered in spiders.

After Czech homework is done, it’s time to read. Again, this is not so much for pleasure tonight as it is to learn. You see, I am losing the plot. Again.

I have written a few books, mostly novels. And while the writing within these books is generally solid and the characters somewhat interesting and not so 2D, I do have a problem: I lose the plot. That is, I end up going on some insane journey within my story and end up in some random place with no idea how I got there. That is not a fun experience when you drink too much and it can be frustrating when you’re writing too.

To be clear, we’re talking about fiction. With my Hammered Histories, I have a much better instinct when it comes to defining and understanding a narrative and knowing what to slice out – even if it means doing that oh so famous story-cide and killing my darlings. No, no. When I am writing a longer work of fiction, all manners of things happen to my characters. The Iraqi diner owner ends up in Brazil with the Romanian hairdresser – who also happens to have an ongoing boundary feud with the guy who runs the video store. The stumbled-upon corpse has two death certificates in city hall – one from the Revolutionary War and one from the Civil War! (I thought that sounded neat and justified that I’d figure out how it was possible in any way later on. Spoiler alert: never did.) The long lost sister has a long lost brother.

You get the picture. Fun to write? Yes. But six months into writing when I was not halfway through a novel and it was already 230 Word pages, I knew I had a problem to deal with. Also, if you’re not careful, then writing first drafts can become a ‘I’ll deal with that later’ issue. And that can be a minefield. How to organize and edit?

Enter Save the Cat.